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Daverd writes "Hundreds of students at 18 universities nation-wide have had lawsuits filed against them by the RIAA for filesharing over Internet2." The official RIAA Press Release and commentary at MSNBC is also available. From the article: "i2Hub has been seen as a safe haven, and what we wanted to do was puncture that misconception," said Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA. "This has been a subversion of the research purposes for which Internet2 was developed."

I believe you meant to say:"Yes, we all hate the *AA's *AND* they were breaking the law, and bastardizing a research network."

The RIAA is not an academic/research institution, and therefore had no business being on the I2 to monitor file sharing activity in the first place. They were abusing the network and probably breaking laws governing access to restricted computer systems to be on there at all.

But of course we all know it's perfectly all right to break in to other peoples' private networks, as long as you've got plenty of money and lawyers and lobbyists to back you up.

i've heard rumors (note these are only rumors) that they have recruited students at various colleges to monitor file sharing networks, probably giving them access to the tools they use and probably bribing them as well.

Any number of reasons exist for a student or an employee to know that the school's facilities are being used to traffic music on the I2. Any number of reasons also exist for someone to pass the information on to the attornies representing either the RIAA or the school.

In fact, I'd wager that a condition of employment at the school is to not engage in or facilitate illegal activity. It would be pretty hard for a network admin to learn that some kid was illegally moving tens of thousands of files through his servers, then keep his mouth shut, and not be vulnerable to charges of aiding a criminal activity. Fear of getting caught covering that up would be a strong motivator to report the activity to the school.

In fact, I'd wager that a condition of employment at the school is to not engage in or facilitate illegal activity. It would be pretty hard for a network admin to learn that some kid was illegally moving tens of thousands of files through his servers, then keep his mouth shut, and not be vulnerable to charges of aiding a criminal activity. Fear of getting caught covering that up would be a strong motivator to report the activity to the school.

It does not matter if the evidence is admissible in court because none of the RIAA cases ever make it to court. The students will settle with the RIAA like everyone else who they have sued in the past.

That's a potentially dangerous thing to do. Suppose I run a honeypot p2p with fake-named files (e.g., the filename says Britney Spears but doesn't have her crap music in it), and one of these overzealous stool pigeons rats me to the RIAA. The RIAA sues me, and during discovery I find out how they got the information on the files I was sharing. Then, when I find out who finked on me, I sue their ass for my court costs in the first case.

How would anyone be able to prove intent? You could say the intent was to punish people illegaly downloading music (and you could say as much in all the files downloaded). In fact I would say a few honeypots would be a great money-making scheme for an industrious student. Hmm, perhaps it's time to go back to grad school...

Seriously, if I had "Internet2" at my disposal, I could most certainly find something more productive (6 CD Linux install in a few seconds? Yes please.)or at the very least more illegal to do with it than download a lot of crappy music!

Yeah right. Aside from using it to test some pretty fancy high speed protocols [home.cern.ch], the Internet2 in general is really nothing more than a fast pipe for college students to download music on, insulated from the original Internet by BGP. You never see an academic conference requiring "tests on the Internet2" because its geographic concentration is entirely in North America [internet2.edu] and its speed is totally beyond anything you see in the real Internet; that is why everyone wants PlanetLab [planet-lab.org] instead.

What's very interesting is that many comments have been made for how P2P scales or doesn't scale, especially if it's partly decentralized, fully decentralized, encrypted, and/or anonymized beyond immediate neighbors.

Why is this NOT a legitimate use of I2? Sure, copyright violations are illegal either way, but, if I2 is not very efficient for me to snag Slackware via torrents, then perhaps bittorrent could be improved to function better over higher-bandwidth connections.

I am a student at the University of Pittsburgh, and all traffic from residence halls, no matter what it is, is automatically routed over the Internet2 when it is to another university. We do not have an upload cap for this traffic. For all traffic to the "regular Internet", if a connection is made to us, our upload and download speed over that connection is limited to 500 bytes/second or slower. This makes tasks such as AIM Direct Connect useless, and even useful features such as SSH are almost too slow for use. However, any Internet2 traffic, even as an incoming connection to me, runs at several MB/sec upload and download (essentially the full 100mbps connection).

I2hub is used extensively here, and there has been no issues with bandwidth that I am aware of. If it was an issue, the university has shown they have the capabilities to put restrictions in place. Personally, I use i2hub to get legal files (such as Linux ISO images or the TV show that aired last night that I missed, though this is controversial) because the download speed is so fast.

This is not abusing the research network; rather, it is using a network with extreme amounts of bandwidth that would otherwise go unused.

or the TV show that aired last night that I missed, though this is controversial

No, it's not controversial, it's illegal. There is no greay area here whatsoever - unauthorized distribution of copyright material is illegal. The TV show is copyrighted, the copyright holder has not granted you permission to download it (or the sender to upload it).

Not being american, I have to ask, is possession really a copyright infringement? I can understand that the copying in it self of course is illegal. I can understand that a specific copy can have been made in a non legal way, but is possession of that copy an infringemen? Any use of such a copy, as long as it is not a copyright infringement itself, should be legal no? And if not so, do you know were in the law it is said so?

It IS legal to tape a TV program for a friend and share it with them them . . . err, at least in the country I currently live in, Canada. It has certainly been legal for quite some time in the States to tape TV programs for yourself [ce.org], so it's a grey area as to whether you can distribute them afterwards . . . yes, in the case of downloading TV programs it's currently considered illegal, however, enough various legislation that it would be a tough case to call, if someone downloaded a program that they misse

This post is the copyrighted property of me. You may only make one copy of this post for personal use. Any additional copies, such as that made by your browser cache, in the registers of your CPU, or on your retina are a violation of copyright law.

Because I'm a nice guy, I'll make it easy on you. Pay me $5,000 and promise not to do it again, and I'll let you off the hook.

Personally, I use i2hub to get legal files (such as Linux ISO images or the TV show that aired last night that I missed, though this is controversial) because the download speed is so fast.

I can attest to the enforcement of the distributing of TV shows. I got the following lovely notice about a year ago from our friends at the RIAA- after getting a Star Trek Enterprise episode off of bittorrent:

We have received information that, at the above noted date and time, the IP address [removed] was used to off

Actually this IS a research project! For years scientists have pushed poor mice through mazes with little to show (for the mouse), but some cheese and confusion. Here we shoot MP3's down a digital pipe and log the time it takes for "Weasels In Suits" (tm) to come sniffing for money. The abstract for the eventual paper resulting from this might finally explain some of the more perplexing issues surrounding weasel in suits behavior... The paper could have graphs for such things as: "press conference exposure ratio". You could maybe do a full study on the number of times names are reused in Word documents ( W.I.S. are notorious for failing to clear mark-up changes in Word documents). I see doctoral thesis material written large all over this..

That does not give the *AA the right to use extortionary techniques to threaten University's into installing filtering devices that hurt legitimate Internet2 uses (including research) and suppress the rights of students to use applications such as i2hub for legitimate purposes (like here at UMiami). It does not give them the right to access a private network they are not authorized to access, although they claim to have done it legally, but according to TFA, the exec of I2 says they were not given access. The whole lawsuit thing in general is extortionary... "give us money or else your legal fees when we bring you into court will be far higher." And furthermore, "bastardization of a research network"? Last analysis I looked at showed file sharing did not interfere with research activities, because there's just so damn much bandwidth, bandwidth to dorms is typically throttled according to the academic usage, and peak activity occurs at a different time of day.

Vigilante justice, extortion, and unauthorized access of a private network are not tactics that are justifiable regardless of whether the people you are after are breaking the law.

Best thing the RIAA can do now is convince everyone to buy music only direct from artists with an agreement that file-sharing is cool. The RIAA can feel free to up the timetable on that process all they like.

Ack...damn HTML. The full post was: Bastarding a research network? I disagree. All they were doing was... uhh, stress testing the network by sending random bits of data that just happened to look like movies and porn when viewed with a media player.

On a more serious note, while the file swapping was illegal, it did help network engineers figure out how to prepare for the future when everyone has the same bandwidth to their homes as university dorms. When people can send a full CD of data in < 2 minutes

Umm, no, it's not our future network - IPV6 is intended to fix the "current internet" for a long, long time - and we will have the main internet upgraded piece-by-piece until it matches the speeds of I2.

I2 is *only* for educational and experimental use - it should be a place where people at universities can access a site and get a fairly accurate opinion, not "my mama told me that nukular power is bad" and such crap. More importantly, it should not have SPAM, viruses, spyware, and other malware on it at all. True, the no viruses thing is a pipe dream, but if there is no commercial activity, there is no common person on it. I don't have access to it, and I don't *want* access to it. It is the modern-day equivalent to a school library, except it covers a great many schools.

Except that the I2 isn't a seperate "world wide web" of information. It's simply a high-speed data link between universities. Any transmissions between two universities, including student data (emails, files, game packets) get transparently routed onto the faster network. That's why i2hub works. It doesn't have any special access to the internet2 network per se, it just doesn't let people log in unless they have the auto-routing "feature" turned on at their schools.

Not necessarily. I don't see any reason why i2 couldn't be used to develop secure, anonymous, and impervious to lawsuit P2P networks, a lá freenet (but maybe with a more "gnutellish" interface). But then, architectural issues aside, I'm sure that no publicly funded research is undertaken for the sole purpose of copyright infringement. Here's hoping that there is other stuff on that hub that (legally) justifies its existence.

On a related note, anyone who hasn't read Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture" and has strong oppinions on the topic of filesharing and copyrights owes it to themselves to read this wonderful book. It really gives alot of background to the debate, and puts to rest alot of myths that the major copyright owners would have you buy into. More info at Lessig.org [lessig.org].

But you see no problem with taking resources that I (and others) payed for for your own purposes. In the eyes of the general public, illegal P2P slid by most people because it wasn't affecting their pocketbook....

Sorry that'll never justify illegal P2P activity on Internet2.

I guess we'll just have to wait for the Supreme Court to decide MGM v. Grokster to see if there is such justification. Lower courts have already ruled in favor of Grokster.

As for your money being wasted, society stands to gain a great deal if a truly anonymous P2P architecture is developed and implemented. Think freedom of speech issues - think human rights and the great firewall of China, etc... Internet2 is the perfect host for such development. The parent poster argued that P2P was not a legitimate use of Internet2, I showed that it could very well be. I also denounced copyright infringement.

Your position seems to be that because the technology can be used to commit acts of copyright infringement, then your tax dollars should not go to funding its research. That position is so short-sighted as to be absurd. By your reasoning, we should not even fund research into new types of higher density writable media, as they might (and inevitably will) be used by some people to make illegal copies of things. Imagine the losses that society might suffer were we all to believe as you do.

"This has been a subversion of the research purposes for which Internet2 was developed."

Let me know if you disagree, but actually, this is true.

The thing is, though, the way most sites do their routing, if you're at an I2 site (most major US univerities) and communicating with some other I2 site you're using I2 whether you're doing research or not. All internet traffic between e.g. MIT and Cal Tech goes over I2 whether it's research or P2P. So you really can't get on anybody's case for treating

You just cant keep 100 TB of files "hidden" for all that long. Considering all the press [slashdot.org] it got last year, I'm surprised it has even lasted even this long.

Also, don't forget our friends in the MPAA. In a short post [com.com] by the author of the news.com.com article: "According to the RIAA, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) will be announcing similar action later today."

In case you don't read the article, here are the universities in question: Boston University, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Drexel University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at San Diego, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of Pittsburgh and the University of Southern California.Go RIT!

I see MIT listed, but no Cal-Tech. I guess the guys at Cal-Tech are either more honest and only buy music and never share, or they don't get caught.

BTW, I also see Harvard and Princeton. I like that. Those are the guys who are damn good at shit like Law and turning a simple argument into a 5 year long case.

Harvard Student: "But your Honor, we have not examined how this law relates to the 1892 Kapskern case"
Judge: "Kapskern??"
Harvard Student: "Yes, it set a precident about if the tomatoe is a fruit or vegitable, and there are many parallels between that question and the question of sharing music".Judge: Irrelevent, find something else.Harvard Student: We motion for a continuance so we can file an appeal to this decision.
Judge: Case postponed for appelate review, we'll recovien in 4 months.

Harvard Student: Ladies and gentlemen of the supposed jury, The RIAA's attorney would certainly want you to believe that I downloaded copyrighted material through the internet2. And they make a good case. Hell, I almost felt pity myself! But ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider: Ladies and gentlemen this [pointing to a picture of Chewbacca] is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now, think about that. That does not make sense! Why would a Wookiee--an eight foot tall Wookiee--want to live on Endor with a bunch of two foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense!

Yes, I know you were making a joke, but I'm taking Civil Procedure, and we just covered sanctions.

Completely OT: the Supreme Court declared the tomato a vegetable in Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893) [findlaw.com], in response to a dispute over the Tariff Act of 1883, which taxed vegetables but not fruits.

There was a really good comment in there about how some guy who was an admin on I2 kept getting bogus threat letters from the **AA's, to IPs that had never even existed. A mod up (next time I get points) to the person who finds it!

I work for a research institution. We have an Internet 2 connection. I'm the security guy, and (as if that ain't enough work) I sysadmin the mail exchangers, including maintaining anti-spam and anti-virus there. If you send email to the abuse or postmaster addresses at our site, I get it. If you send email to our domain contact about a security or abuse matter, he forwards it to me, and I answer it.

We get complaints every once in a while from the MPAA or their lackeys, claiming that some host on our network is sharing copies of movies -- The Matrix, Harry Potter, Star Wars: Revenge of George Lucas's Crack Pipe... you name it.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is sending notices toRIT of its intention to subpoena the identity of specific RIT computerusers. This intention is a significant ramp up of the RIAA's efforts tostop illegal file sharing. RIAA has targeted specific computer accounts usedto access and transmit such files, and issued subpoenas to the serviceproviders in order to obtain the names and contact information of thoseresponsible for the file-sharing.

Aside from the conspiracy theories of student informants or government intervention, they could have simply gone to an I2 campus with open WiFi access. Once you're on the i2hub, its all a matter of logging IPs.

I would assume they cut a deal with one of the uni's that had attachment to it. Maybe they agreed not to sue one of them if they (a) shut down the FS network the found on their campus and (b) allowed them to gateway into I2 for a while. That's probably all it took to get one of the institutions to cave.

I'm sure the bribed/threateded/etc one of the I2 instutions to let them snoop traffic. What may be interesting is if someone chooses to fight these lawsuits. It may well be against the university's privacy policy to do what they did. I looked at ours, and letting any thrid party, except law enforcement with a warrant, monitor the network would be a violation.

From reading the RIT letter posted above, it looks like the sent subpoenas to the different universities and got the universities to provide the names of the students. I doubt that the RIAA actually got onto I2 themselves.

What I'd really like to know is how did students running filesharing apps for trading music get authorized to use Internet2? Sure, it's by the universities, but shouldn't we kinda keep it to research projects for the timebeing?

How does it decide? Well, at my uni it's just a matter of the destination. So if I am trying to access www.mit.edu, my packets will fly fast over internet2, and if I want to access www.yahoo.fr, I'll be going over the (slightly slower) internet1 (aka "Commodity Internet").

Additionally, most I2 sites prefer to use I2 where possible because it generally doesn't cost them anything to send bits over it. Whereas commodity bandwidth costs money.

I know./ loves conspiracy theories; but here's another possibility. It only takes one researcher to get pissed off because his/her legitimate research over I2 is being negatively impacted by rampant filesharing traffic. He/She calls up the RIAA, and bob's your uncle.

"This is Lars Ulrich, drummer of Metallica. Last week, he purchased a gold plated shark table to be installed in his basement club. But because of file sharers, he has to wait another week.
This is the home of P. Miller, his wife, and his 4 year old son. All little TImmy wanted was an island in French Polynesia with giraffes and wild horses running free. But this year, he'll have to settle for his own island in the Bahamas with white Siberian tigers."
-South Park, changed a bit.
The students did do wrong though. 19535^13 megabits per second should not be used to share One Night In Paris.

In their everlasting and Glorious Crusade against music piracy, the RIAA has successfully lobbied congress to make the entire concept of networking illegal, as it has the potential to violate music copyright. Also covered by this broad new bill passed by congress are all forms of LAN protocols such as NFS and Samba. Computers will no longer be allowed to exchange information in any way.

Also covered by the bill is the/bin/cp binary on unix systems, CD and DVD burning devices, pens and pencils, and the freedom to hum and whistle tunes. The RIAA is working hard to enforce a mandatory cutting of vocal cords of all new babies born in the US, and the amputation of their arms so as to make their ability to infringe on Holy Copyrights more difficult.

From the article it said that they weren't divulging how they got this information.

I don't think that the schools are ratting people out because of liability reasons (if the school is monitoring the network, then they have to report EVERY illegal action they see. If they don't monitor the network, then they don't have to report anything... )

The RIAA is certainly not a research institution, and if they are trying to get access to internet2 to "test" it for content delivery, then I can see an argument, but I think the (obvious) real motivation is just to catch filesharers. And that is morally wrong. Even if the filesharers are breaking a law, two wrongs don't make a right.

I'm not sure who is in charge of internet2, but I sure would like to hear that organization tell the RIAA that they're not welcome on internet2 if they're just going to spy on people. If the RIAA starts spending money on new (open) technologies and provides test services for students and researchers, etc... then that might be something. Until then, the RIAA should stay off internet2.

...when no matter how hard they try, no matter how many laws they buy, no matter how many sleazy tactics they pull, the amount of music shared over the internet keeps *increasing* rather than decreasing. From 12-year-old girls to 72-year-old grannies, everyone seems to be getting in on the game and no amount of whining/threatening/suing by the RIAA is making so much as a dent in the traffic.

Seems it's time to re-evaluate the situation and see if the law - and perhaps someone's business model - is in need of change.

Ok, there is a way to beat this cartel [riaa.org] at their own game. It's like diamonds, similarly run by cartels. You see, when a person gives their whole life mining nice, beautiful diamonds, they get only pennies . . . the pay for the people actually producing the diamonds is very little. The cartel that runs the industry, and the owners of the diamond companies make all the money.

Music, unlike diamonds, does not rely on a natural resource. I've yet to figure out why the hell people just don't switch to independent music. You'd be amazed at how good this type of music really is. You can go to a show for $0.00 to $10.00, RECORD it if you want, TRADE it at will usually, and the MAJORITY of the money goes to the artists!

The key here is that the MUSIC INDUSTRY is SUING the people IN COLLEGE who should simply REVOLUTIONIZE the industry! Go to your local jam band concerts, frequent the college shows, screw the big labels, use your own mind and broaden it. If the money goes independent, then so will the artists. And the artists who want to keep making sixty cents for every ten bucks their parent company makes can go right ahead. They're done getting my money.

Catch: What if there is a band signed to a label that you like. It doesn't matter if it's U2, or Bon Jovi, or Def Leppard, or Jethro Tull, or Rush. They're signed. And if they put out a new album, you're frelled.

That's the whole problem with the whole "ditch the RIAA and all their artists" thing. Some people like some of the bands that have been signed.

Catch: What if there is a band signed to a label that you like. It doesn't matter if it's U2, or Bon Jovi, or Def Leppard, or Jethro Tull, or Rush. They're signed. And if they put out a new album, you're frelled.

Exactly. I've tried listening to some stuff on cdbaby.com and some other places, but just haven't heard anything I really like. It doesn't help that I don't seem to like any kind of newer American music: most of my favorite stuff is 70's-80's rock and heavy metal, and a large amount of European heavy metal. Of course, I don't like much RIAA stuff either, but my favorite bands are all 15+ years old, so they're well established and of course, RIAA signed, so if I want copies of their new albums, I either have to download them illegally or buy them at RIAA prices.

If I do buy any CDs, I always get them used, so at least I'm not directly supporting the RIAA (except by helping maintain the value of CDs after first sale), but I absolutely refuse to buy any CDs that have copy protection.

If I take a Maxtor [tinyurl.com] 300GB portable usb drive, plugs it into my pc, loads up with movies, and ships of to a friend? Huge capcity, overnight, or in a few days at least. And besides, ??AA has no real chance of uncovering such transfers.

Well, realistically. What about VPN? Having hard [pgp.com] encryption [gnupg.org] easily obtainable, it should be trivial to share files with friends. If a key is signed by a large enough number of friends, trust it. Otherwise, discard.
If a p2p net included strong cryptographi, and trust levels and/or ratings to users, it would be far more difficult for ??AA to eavesdrop those connections. At very least, they'd have to build up a trust, which would probably mean sharing...

With regards to the trust system you describe, there is already some research along those lines with regards to defeating file spoofing.

IIRC, the idea is that a file must either be spoofed or not. If Alice reports accurately as to which are and which are not, then you'd trust her ratings. If Bob reports inaccurately (i.e. claiming that spoofed files are not spoofed) then not only can you ignore him, you may even be able to assume that he always lies, which can provide useful information.

You could make multiple users, to avoid building up a bad history, but this would mean that you'd also fail to build up a good history, and if people only trust ratings from people with a good history, this might not be practical.

Similarly, you could try to make an attack by only lying sometimes, but since you're still mostly providing good information, you're still generally providing a benefit to other users.

If you poke around, I'm sure you can find a better description of this general idea.

See, They (RIAA/MPAA) really really hated napster. Why? Everyone was on Napster, so if you looked for something you found it. easy, illegal, Cool.

Now they want to fragment the file sharing networks. They're not stupid, they know they can't stop pirating completely, the goal is to make it harder, less worthwhile so people who have limited time and a budget (working people) to figure out the p2p method de jour and will just pony up th 99 cents for a sure bet good copy.

for which the Constitution's copyright clause was conceived?
IIRC it was mainly one to make people create, not litigate...
If the founding fathers had imagined industries suing hundreds of students into oblivion (with copyrights extended into eternity), they would have scrapped the clause altogether, straight from the drafting board, back in the 18th century...

...*AA don't belong on I2. They aren't researchers, they aren't proper party to its development, their desires aren't germane to what I2 is for.

In addition to avoiding spending a single penny on any of their crud, sooner or later, they are going to go upgainst one or more people who will fight them tooth and nail in court in a to-the-death legal slugfest of attrition. All they are doing is making themselves look like greedy bastards.

I'm not paranoid that they will eliminate file sharing whether legal or questionable, or wipe out fair use altogether. I'm confident they'll lose in the end. It just amazes me that they can be so dense as to think lawsuit frenzy will win them converts to their arguments or make enough people fear them. They ain't the government and don't have its police powers, no matter how many suits they file.

How did they get on I2 and why? Is there an action that can be taken against them being there? Fine, supposed IP was being shared. Shotgunning lawsuits was not the answer. And to attack universities where the ratio of anti to pro corporate/ip-Nazi sentiment is so lopsided? They need to receive a Darwin Awards Lifetime Achievement trophy.

I am curious about how the *AAs gained access to a restricted research network. Granted those people who were sharing non-research related files were probably violating the terms of use as well, but that does not excuse the unauthorized breaking and entry of the *AAs, if indeed that is how they got in, into a private research network. Couldn't the *AAs be busted too for breaking in or paying an insider? This is a legal grey area at the very least.

That depends on your definition of effective. PeerGuardian does what it claims to do, and that is block connections to and from IP ranges known to be used by RIAA, MPAA, and their hired guns. If this makes you feel good, then by all means, install PeerGuardian. However, be warned that a "good feeling" is all that you're going to get. The logic behind PeerGuardian doesn't go full circle, for two reasons.

First off, the PeerGuardian concept assumes that all enemy attacks are going to come from known enemy IP space. This is a dangerous and rather dumb assumption; nothing says that the RIAA or BayTSP et al are scanning/probing P2P networks from their own IP space. They might not be popular, but most of these organizations are full of lawyers and other relatively smart people. They do have at least half a clue.

It's long been rumored that some of these organizations recruit a) employees to run P2P crawlers at home and b) students to run P2P crawlers on campus. The fact that they've somehow obtained access to Internet2 makes the idea that they're paying students to run P2P crawlers all the more likely. My guess is that running P2P spidering software on behalf of RIAA might be part of some silent settlements that we aren't hearing about. "We caught you sharing files you're not allowed to. Either we sue you, you pay us $2000 and we go away, or you run this nice little program and promise not to tell anyone..."

So, PeerGuardian blocks a few connections from "known" RIAA IP space (nevermind that many of the blocks are a bit overzealous and will generate false positives). The user is lulled into a false sense of security - hey, it's working! Connections from those evil bastards are being stopped! I'm safe!!

But are you sure that the connection from a Comcast cablemodem isn't really an RIAA lawyer's home PC? How do you know what application is really connecting to you from that rice.edu address?

Secondly, from what I understand of the C&D letters being sent to ISPs, and perhaps even some of the lawsuits being filed, often times no connection was involved at all. The P2P spidering software does a search for "Britney Spears MP3," parses the results, and builds a list of IP/Date/Filename. They don't actually try to connect to your computer and download the file, otherwise Professor Usher would never have been threatened, admins would not be getting C&D letters regarding IPs which have never been lit up, etc.

PeerGuardian is a nice idea. It apparently makes a lot of people feel better. And it might even work if this was 1980 when everyone on the internet was exactly who they said they were.

Don't go crying to the PeerGuardian authors when you get caught anyway.

Here is an article [thetartan.org] about the issue that was published in yesterday's edition of The Tartan, the student newspaper of Carnegie Mellon, one of the universities targeted by the RIAA. There was also an editorial [thetartan.org] written about the issue. (Note: The Tartan's website cannot be rendered in Internet Explorer. Please use a standards-compliant web browser.)

Also, below is the full text of an email that was sent to all students on April 4 from Carnegie Mellon's Chief Information Officer Joel Smith.

We are writing to remind the entire campus community of the University's commitment to the protection of intellectual property and copyrighted material. When it comes to illegal copying of digital materials - whether music, video, text, or pictures - the University imposes its own penalties (disciplinary action, loss of network connectivity) on anyone who is found to be using Carnegie Mellon's network for such purposes.

Moreover, the trade organizations that are charged with protecting copyrighted materials, e.g. the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), are aggressively searching for copyright violators on the Internet and *will take independent legal action against such violators.* Peer to peer file sharing activity using the Carnegie Mellon network is accessible to their monitoring. Past actions by these industry associations have resulted in substantial monetary penalties
imposed on the individuals involved. See:

In fact, according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, penalties can range from $750 to $150,000 per song if songs are the items being distributed illegally.

Please be aware that the target of these actions is not the University, but rather the individuals engaged in the violations. As an Internet service provider, following the results of court rulings last year, the University is obliged to respond to subpoenas from organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA requesting the names of individuals who operate computers illegally sharing copyrighted materials. Do not be misled by the fact that Verizon, as an Internet service provider, won its case for not providing user names in
response to certain kinds of "John Doe" subpoenas. The ruling allows the RIAA and the MPAA to discover the identities of copyright violators from Internet service providers (including universities) as long as they follow certain legal procedures.

Simply put, if you are engaged in illegal use of copyrighted materials (usually done by peer-to-peer file sharing using programs like Kazza, LimeWire, BitTorrent, and others) and the University receives a proper subpoena asking for the name of the person who registered the computer being used for such purposes on the Carnegie Mellon network, we are legally obligated to supply that name. The result may well be that the RIAA or MPAA will take legal action against *you*. There is nothing the University can do to shield you from such action.

Since your identity on the network is based on the match between your name an the IP address and *MAC* or *hardware* address of your computer, it is a very good idea to be sure that all and only the computers you physically control are registered to you. You can check the list of computers you have registered to your name using Computing Services' NetReg system. Go to http://netreg.net.cmu.edu [cmu.edu], click on the Enter button at

In all this endless discussion about law and who 'owns' music, let us not forget that RIAA has no moral right to own music anymore.

By indefinitely extending the copyright period by paying off the politicians, the RIAA companies stole the public domain.

This is the biggest theft of artistic work in history.

As a result, they have no longer any moral right to claim to own music copyrights.

Copyrights are based on the principal that there is finite period of copyright ownership for artistic material. Since they broke this fundamental legal pricipal, we have no moral obligation to accept their claims of ownership of any artistic material, regardless of how old or new it may be.

The rule of law is a balance: destroy the balance and you have destroyed your legal protection.

Uhm, 1999 called and they want their bullshit excuses back. The general concensus on/. for several years has been that individual infringers should be punished and not the technology. Here, you have the RIAA doing just that, instead of trying to get I2 banned or restricted.

It doesn't matter that they weren't charging for access to the information. Copyright infringement occurs when you copy someone else's protected work.

I remember back during the lawsuit when slashdotters were complaining that the RIAA wasn't suing the actual infringer. Now that they are suing the actual infringers, why is everyone complaining.

And no, the RIAA isn't going to sue you for making and mp3 rip of your friend's CD (although they would be within their rights to do sue). They are going to sue those who are doing the largest amount of copying. That used to be bootleggers, but it is now everyday Joe college students sharing hundreds of gigabytes of copyrighted material to everyone else on the Internet.

"No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical

its [sic] not like they where charging for access to this information.That has nothing to do with it. It doesn't matter if you are charging money or not. It is still a violation of the copyright owner's IP.Where the hell did this idea that it's okay if you don't charge came from?

Is the RIAA going to sue me for making an mp3 rip of my friend's CD now too?If they feel it's worth the time and money, yes. Fair Use does not allow copies to be made i

Why is this modded insightful? Every time one of these threads comes up, someone says this. Every. Single. Fucking. Time. If anything it should be modded "Redundant".

Anyhoo, a lot of the stuff the RIAA puts out bites, but there are some geeks, some of whom post on Slashdot, who like some of the music on an RIAA affiliated label.

Likewise, just because music is independent doesn't mean it's good. 99% of everything is crap. That means music that's on the radio. That means independant artists and labels too.

Besides, I haven't heard about any local "independant" group that isn't metal in some form or another (Death, Christian, Heavy, whatever) or punk. Frankly, I don't like metal, I prefer something with a melody. And I can't find it in the independant scene. And I don't particularly like punk (With the exception of the Ramones, the Clash, and "I Hate You" from the soundtrack of Star Trek IV).

Anyhoo, a lot of the stuff the RIAA puts out bites, but there are some geeks, some of whom post on Slashdot, who like some of the music on an RIAA affiliated label.

I agree with you on this one. There is some stuff on RIAA labels that is good. My guess is some people don't even know just how many damn labels there are in the RIAA. There's also stuff on non-RIAA labels that I like. But in the end, I agree with the "Don't buy it" attitude. If you are really pissed at the RIAA for all their idiotic actions, boycott them. No, a boycott is not always going to be fun - sometimes it hurts to stick to your morals. For example, I really started getting into Bad Religion about a year and a half ago. I loved every album I could get my hands on, but since a lot of their stuff is from Atlantic, I won't buy it.

Go ahead and rip on the Slashbots who spew the "Everything indie is good, everything RIAA is crap" line over and over again. However, don't demean the message that a true boycott sends. I vote with my dollars because that's what I believe in.

How would you people feel if I would take Open Office (for example) and rewrite a part of it, so it could read/write.doc files with 100% relliability and then distribute that binary to all of my employees (say, 2000 workers). But I wouldn't provide the source.

I'd thinka) you're complying with the licence terms, as theGPL doesn't require you to publish the source as you're not distributing outside your companyb) good on you for using open source to improve the lot of your employeesc) it's a bad example, anyway - because:

copying music is not stealing, it's not theft, it's copyright infringement. Different laws, different penalties, different circumstances. Calling it theft won't make it so.

The goal of Free software is to spread knowledge rather than restricting it, using copyright to increase the public good rather than diminish it.Sharing music is much the same principle - new music comes from a vast pool of existing melodies, riffs and lyrics, and I'd rather it was shared into the public domain than locked up with DRM for at least 100 years. Imagine if those who profited so much from selling other people's work had to give 49% to the artist, another 49% into the public domain (charity, maybe) and only got to keep 2%. Would they consider that fair? So why should we consider them constantly changing the copyright bargain to suit themselves fair?

Sharing music is arguably unethical, but so is charging students $15,000 a track (a penalty designed for commercial infringement) with no chance of them being able to afford to fight.

The RIAA are a private police force using the court system to extort money from people for the benefit of corporations. In addition, they've sued a 12 year old girl, a grandmother who couldn't have infringed, and someone who was dead. Personally, I hope someone accused by error goes to court, wins, and countersues the RIAA's members for a massive amount.